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Darkrasp's Update 4/3/2017

Time once again for a recap of the last couple weeks. We're back into the full swing of development and a lot is happening. Honestly I wish I'd taken better notes during the week because we've pushed out a lot of fixes and I can't even remember what all of them are. I'll do my best to summarize.

First of all Gorbulas and I have both been addressing lots of database issues from the tracker. They're typically quick fixes. He does a lot of fixing npc waypoints, quest levels, quest rewards, missing tags for elite mobs or quests, group quests, etc. I do a lot of npc ability fixes and droprate adjustments, or adding missing drop items. Gorbulas' fixes come in large part due to the fact that a lot of our database is backported TBC data, so it's just a matter of reverting the information back to Vanilla stats. Alternatively, there are some things he does that are just errors in the database due to better research having been done since the data was originally compiled.

My spell bugs tend to come from a few things.. One is typos that I made myself when I wrote the scripts, another is from changes to the scripting engine since those scripts were written that require addressing. Thirdly is just broken spells, which are addressed separately with spellfixes or spell scripts.

Drop corrections for missing items, bad drop rates, etc. tend to come from the nature of how I built the loot database. Certain quest items didn't get added properly, some droprates were estimated by me based on data from a few sources, and of course, there are a bunch of typos and copy/paste errors. Fortunately, these are all super easy fixes. I don't mind sitting down in the evening and seeing a dozen of those reports because I can typically clear them all up within 30 minutes or so and feel good about knocking a bunch of issues off the tracker by barely lifting a finger, before I start banging my head against larger and more substantial bugs.

More good news is that Rodeg has got some free time from his studies and is back to work. He's got a bunch of issues assigned to him and has already pushed a few fixes, including a couple just today.

Asura has been working like a fiend.. This is where my memory gets hazy because he's been working on a bunch of different things. In the last five days he's worked on the reputation and faction systems, fixed a major AI bug with triggered creature events, fixed bugs with flightpaths, implemented an extremely draconian server-side anti-cheat and started working on the false positives, fixed a bunch of spell bugs, got rid of a dirty fallback for data loading and implemented a proper fix for it, along with a whole bunch of other smaller things. Including fishing. In his words (more or less), "I never fished when I played retail. I've fished more in the last four weeks than I ever did in all my years of playing." I don't remember what he was working on before that. It's been pretty crazy.

I've put in a handful of core fixes this week myself, though nothing that impressive. I did some work on pickpocketing, fixed an issue with the armor reduction calculation and prepared the TBC version of it as well, another pass to improve the Avoidance math (dodge/block/parry), a couple fishing fixes of my own, and I started some work on Energize threat. It's a partial fix, though. What this means is popping a mana potion, rage potion, or Bloodrage will give you threat, as will gaining rage or mana from talents like Improved Shield Block. However, the threat from those gains are not supposed to be modified by "percent threat generated" auras, such as Warrior stances, and right now they are. Also, it's apparently somehow bled into periodic energizes like Mana Spring Totems, even though those shouldn't give threat. I'm going to have to figure those ones out. I started work on a bypass for the aura modifier code on my local test machine, but my first attempt went horribly wrong and I was getting all sorts of bizarre effects, so I just reverted the changes and I'm going to try a new way tomorrow or Wednesday. Win some, lose some.

Anyways, our bug tracker is pretty lively. Elicas is the king of bug reports, a huge percentage of the bugs are from him alone. We're maintaining a pretty solid percentage of resolved bugs, and we have lots of issues that we have written fixes for and are waiting to be pushed to the test realm for a recheck. Many of the bugs are, as I mentioned before, very simple fixes. We can usually write the patches for about 75% of the bugs that come in on the same day they are reported. Others take a little more time, or we kind of ignore since we know they are part of larger issues already being worked on, or are duplicates of other reports (mechanically, though affecting a different NPC or whatever). As an example, we had three separate reports about pickpocketing not working for certain Rogue quests.. the bug in that case was a larger issue with pickpocketing in general.

The "big issues" undergoing work right now, for me anyways, are an issue with aura saving for players when they log in and out, some funkiness with combo points that was fixed earlier but recent changes have caused to break again, and the Energize threat I was talking about before. Should have all those cleared up by the weekend, I think. Roadblock, Soulson, and sQweegle have been doing some incredible work on the math for stat/hp/mp gains on levelup, so I'm also looking forward to working with them on implementing that in the core.

So, things are progressing well. No snags or delays, and we're working away nicely. Everything still on track. As far as more videos or a website frontend, our focus recently has just been on writing code and fixing mechanics. We have a list of things we want to get done before we are comfortable taking our feet off the gas and spending time on videos or other "side-projects". We've decided to stay focused on development until we get close to Open Beta, and then we'll start the work of producing promotional materials. Right now we're full steam ahead on development and want to keep our momentum going.

Alright, that's all for now. My next update will be on Monday, April 17th. As always, feel free to ask questions or leave comments below. Talk to you soon, and thanks again for your continued interest in Crestfall.

P.S. I know that the date in the thread title and the image are reversed. Inari is kind enough to make the banners for me, and prefers the European dating format, whereas I use the North American one.

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As always, very much appreciate the updates. Great to hear that everything is screaming along full speed like a mag-rail. I don't really care about the promo stuff being done if it means the core is ready earlier. I think things will take off as soon as the servers are opened.

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Sounds like you're really working your asses off, which is great to hear and I think I can speak for everyone when I say that we appreciate it very much, so thanks again. It's awesome that even the little stuff gets the necessary attention, if you keep going like that I won't be able to contain my excitement in the next few months.

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I just made my forum account a few days ago, but have being visiting anonymously for a long time. Keep going with the good work, you guys are awesome. Like a lot of people, I really appreciate what is happening here with these updates and all. My best thoughts to all of you volunteers.

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Nice to know that fishing is being looked into. Though if there were one non-Blizz like thing on CF that I wouldn't mind, it'd literally be fishing to not be such a pain in the ass as it was in retail.

Either way, thanks for the update. Lookin forward to open beta, yadda yadda

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One thing I've always been wondering myself, although some could find it a minor aspect... do you also plan to fix and script features that aren't strictly needed for the gameplay, yet they provide a big deal of immersion and let the most choosy players appreciate how polished a core is? I'm talking about ingame mini-events and all those things retail was littered with that would 'bring the world to life', so to speak, and used to trigger when completing certain quests (e.g. Ammo for Rumbleshot or Operation Recombobulation, just to name a couple I can think of right now from an Alliance starting zone).

Long story short, what level of polish should we expect when the realm opens?

My own personal thought about this is practicality through compromise: focusing too much on fixing and scripting everything might delay development and release date, while bugs and non-scripted content could make people believe things were rushed and done with carelessness... even minor things, to a picky player. So a key strategy to success suggests focus should be where most of the population will end up concentrating, that is endgame areas and starting zones alike. Endgame is a realm's living room, where players spend most of their time once level capped, whereas starting zones are the facade, the first introduction to the realm for newcomers, and seeing the population curve on level distribution in Census+ through the first months after a server launch provides the best hint to what I'm trying to stress: prioritize low and high level areas, then move on towards the medium brackets, following and adjusting to the natural distribution of the population through time in order to enjoy the highest appeal to as many people as possible.

Oh, and talking about promotional material: I would suggest you hiring Hurricane, the artist who made the most impressive teasers and trailers about WoW I've ever seen (mainly for the TwinStar private project)... if he didn't end up being hired by Blizzard already (he said on Reddit he was contacted by them, about six months ago, and wouldn't do any more jobs for private servers, but it could still worth a try).

Cya!

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@Pvt_8Ball@raiko
We brought people in to test classes, but they tend to report all kinds of things, we're just fixing everything that comes at us. Classes are still the main focus but we're working on a little bit of everything, mostly prioritizing by severity. We're satisfied with our rate of progress so far.

@Aurigon
I realize that having just our current dev staff scripting every little quest and event, in addition to our other work, would take just about forever. That's why we are crowdsourcing the scripting to volunteers. We're starting internally with a couple of the beta testers who have extensive programming experience, and then having them teach additional volunteers after we work out deficiencies with the scripting engine. With any luck, we'll have a dozen people writing quest/event scripts Soon(tm), and we won't have to spend any time on that at all other than reviewing and inspecting the completed scripts for exploits, instability, errors, etc.